Organised on the occasion of the publication of the latest issue of the magazine “Transbordeur. Photographie, histoire, société”, this talk is dedicated to the relationship between photography and artificial intelligence (AI). The principles implemented in these new technologies, which emerged around 2020, are indeed manifold and have their own history: "machine vision" describes technologies for vision or visual recognition by machines, the first models of which date back to the 1960s; the “text-to-image” models that seem to be gaining ground today raise the question of how images are indexed by language; and finally, tools for producing text from images are also being experimented with today. The principles underlying the production and use of image-generating algorithms have been developed since the 1980s. The talk aims to offer a historical and critical perspective on these phenomena and, where appropriate, to propose a critique of the economic model and ideological frameworks that underpin them.

With Estelle Blaschke, Christian Joschke (tbc) and Olivier Lugon

Image: photograph taken by an Amazon temp worker at his workstation, illustration from the Meta Office research project led by Lea Scherer, Lauritz Bohne and Edward Zammit.